Ellen Burstyn won the Best Actress Academy Award for Alice non abita più qui (1974) while performing in the "Same Time, Next Year" play on Broadway. In the same year, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress for the play. Ironically, Burstyn received both awards at the same time in the same week. Burstyn is one of only two actresses to win both awards in the same year. The other actress was Audrey Hepburn who won a best Actress Tony for "Ondine" in the same year she won an Oscar for Vacanze romane (1953).
The external shots were filmed using an ocean-front cottage that is now part of the Heritage House Inn on the Mendocino coast in Little River, Northern California. Writer Bernard Slade and his wife stayed there a few years before Slade wrote the play and it is this cottage which inspired the "Same Time, Next Year" play. The room was distinctive for having a log fireplace, out-of-tune piano together with much antique furniture. The shell of the cottage was built as a temporary dwelling especially made for filming, the interiors were shot in the studio. When the film was finished, Universal Pictures gave the cottage to the inn and paid for the foundations to be made permanent with the interior fitted-out with studio furnishings from the movie. The building was converted into two cottages, one called "Same Time" and the other "Next Year". The actual cottage today is now listed for rent as the "Same Time Next Year Suite" and is a popular tourist attraction for romantic holidays.
Ellen Burstyn reprises her role from the Broadway production. Alan Alda replaces Charles Grodin from the original company. (Loretta Swit, Alda's MASH (1972) co-star, replaced Burstyn in the Broadway role in 1976.)
The time span featured in this movie is 26 years, from 1951 to 1977. The years depicted are one day in February in 1951, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1972, and 1977.
Paul McCartney was first asked to write theme music for this film. He came up with a title song called 'Same Time, Next Year'. Paul McCartney & Wings then recorded the song for this film. However the song was rejected and was not used but was later released as the B-side of the 1990 single "Put It There". The song used was Marvin Hamlisch's Academy Award-nominated "The Last Time I Felt Like This".